Paul Schrader (1980)

Introducing the film at BFI, Richard Combs explained that Paul Schrader’s typical protagonists are ‘living in a kind of hell – even if they don’t know it’, and how this is visually expressed in American Gigolo.  There are a few infernally red sequences in the film but the print used for this screening is better described as infuriatingly pink.  It’s startling how badly the colour stock of some big Hollywood productions of the late seventies and early eighties has degenerated – in the case of American Gigolo, the effect is ruinous.  Schrader involved Fernando Scarfiotti, famed for his work on Death in Venice and several Bertolucci films, as visual consultant and there seems to have been consensus that the look of American Gigolo was its chief virtue.  But this print obliterated the tonal sophistication that Schrader, with Scarfiotti and the cinematographer John Bailey, may have achieved:  everything appeared to be smothered in an indelible pink-brown wash.  An effect of this loss of visual allure is to expose how weak American Gigolo is in other ways.

The hell in which the main character, Julian Kaye, resides is Los Angeles, where’s he’s a  prostitute, earning a living good enough to allow him to indulge expensive tastes – for designer clothes, cars, stereos and cocaine.  He’s not unhappy in this world (he seems too passive for the more positive ‘he’s happy’ to sound right) – until he becomes a murder suspect and realises he’s being framed for the crime.  The murderee is the wife of a local financier called Rheiman:  one of Julian’s two pimps sends him to the couple’s house, where the husband asks Julian to penetrate the wife anally, while Rheiman watches and utters viciously misogynistic instructions.  Two days later, Mrs Rheiman is found dead and a post-mortem reveals the sexual sadism to which she’s been subjected.  Schrader was sufficiently interested in the Los Angeles male escorts scene to return to it in The Walker, more than a quarter-century later, but his attitude towards the milieu is as disapproving in American Gigolo as it was in the subsequent film.  Apart from a sequence in which Julian carefully selects an outfit from his vast wardrobe, Schrader presents very little of what this young man does as appealing, let alone seductive.  American Gigolo also comes across as particularly homophobic, in different registers.  Julian accompanies one of his rich clients to a Sotheby’s outlet; when the client is spotted by a female acquaintance who’ll ask tricky questions about her male companion, Julian pretends to be a camp (German) interior designer.  One of the hellishly lit sequences is in a gay club, where Julian, now desperate and on the run from the police, has gone to find Leon, the pimp who sent him to the Rheimans.  It’s eventually revealed that another gigolo in the stable, who is also Leon’s lover, carried out the Rheiman killing.

As Julian, Richard Gere is very right in some respects:  he has a self-aware, narcissistic gait – wherever Julian walks, it’s a catwalk – and Gere’s listless quality fits with the ominous, acquiescent spirit of place that Schrader seems to be trying to capture in his description of Los Angeles.  Julian’s fatuousness and vanity are presumably meant to explain why he’s slow to be alarmed by being questioned by the police but Richard Gere’s congenital indolence on screen means that Julian isn’t sufficiently energised when he’s in crisis.  With Gere in the role, the disturbance of Julian’s life doesn’t go any deeper than a suddenly untidy, unshaven appearance.  It doesn’t help that Paul Schrader’s visualisation of Julian’s world being turned upside down tends to draw attention to the technique involved – as in the flamboyant movement of the camera round Julian’s apartment as he frantically searches for the evidence he’s sure has been planted there (a dismantling of the protagonist’s modus vivendi that calls to mind the much more effective climax to The Conversation).  This showing off behind the camera reinforces the weakness of what Gere does in front of it.  The star’s lack of animation also muffles any sense what’s meant to be Julian’s emotional development through his (unpaid) relationship with Michelle Stratton, the unhappy wife of an ambitious politician – although perhaps Gere should be thanked for this.  Richard Combs talked plenty about Paul Schrader’s Calvinist background and about transcendence and redemption in his work but Julian Kaye in American Gigolo appears to be redeemed by a very familiar panacea in movies:  the love of a good woman.  Michelle, who is already paying the costs of his defence in Julian’s upcoming murder trial, finally decides to provide him with an alibi for the murder by telling the police they spent the night together.  (I wasn’t sure why she didn’t provide Julian with the alibi before the money.)

The beautiful Lauren Hutton gives Michelle Stratton a melancholy graciousness; although she’s limited, Hutton does well in the role, which is known as one that Meryl Streep didn’t play (it’s not clear whether Paul Schrader turned her down or vice versa).   Streep would have been too young for the part:  she’s exactly the same age as Richard Gere and Schrader seems to see it as important that Michelle is an older woman.  More important, Streep would have utterly overpowered the mostly languid American Gigolo:  the very enjoyable edge and drive of ‘Call Me’, sung by Debbie Harry over the opening titles, is nowhere repeated in the film that follows.  (‘Call Me’ was co-written by Harry and Giorgio Moroder, who also wrote the film’s score.  This is effective enough but Moroder’s synthesiser arrangement – for the final scene and closing credits – of the Mozart music subsequently used in Out of Africa is tacky.)   The writing and playing of some of the supporting roles seems to betray an anxiety on Schrader’s part that he needs a few flavoursome characters to compensate for the low-energy principals.  Hector Elizondo is a good actor but the role of the shabby, cigar-smoking cop who keeps turning up to grill Julian and whom the latter underestimates at his peril is no more than a Colombo rip-off.   Nina van Pallandt and Bill Duke are crudely obvious as the two pimps.  I’m beginning to develop an aversion to films with ‘American’ as an adjective in the title.  American Beauty, which has a genuine double meaning, is an honourable exception – but American Gangster, American Graffiti, most recently American Hustle:  these all carry a false suggestion of national definitiveness and so does American Gigolo.

24 November 2014